A different kind of wine from a different kind of winery

Modern Craft director of events Liberty Starkweather Smith makes drinks using Modern Craft wine at the Modern Craft tasting room inside Brewin' On McEwan in downtown Clare.

Modern Craft director of events Liberty Starkweather Smith makes drinks using Modern Craft wine at the Modern Craft tasting room inside Brewin' On McEwan in downtown Clare.

Photo: Midland Daily News

Photo: Midland Daily News

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Modern Craft director of events Liberty Starkweather Smith makes drinks using Modern Craft wine at the Modern Craft tasting room inside Brewin' On McEwan in downtown Clare.

Modern Craft director of events Liberty Starkweather Smith makes drinks using Modern Craft wine at the Modern Craft tasting room inside Brewin' On McEwan in downtown Clare.

Photo: Midland Daily News

A different kind of wine from a different kind of winery

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Modern Craft isn’t a typical Michigan winery.

Sure, the Au Gres-based winemaker sells traditional Michigan red and white wines, but its lineup also includes things such as Mandarin, peach and blackberry wines.

The fruit flavors are the focus of the brand and they are all made possible by proprietary fruit infusion processes created by owner Tom Nixon. The process, and thus the label, was discovered kind of on a whim.

“He was a brewer — he was just doing some backyard brewing,” Liberty Starkweather Smith, event director for Modern Craft, said of the owner. He wanted to try to make some wines and in the process of experimenting, found the method that launched Modern Craft.

“The owner of the winery is actually an engineer by trade,” Smith said.

On the shelf, buyers will see flavors such as peach, raspberry, cucumber melon and Mandarin orange and even fudge from Modern Craft. They’re made from Michigan grapes and infused with fruit flavors.

Modern Craft recently opened a tasting room at Brewin’ On McEwan, 601 N. McEwan St. in Clare. There, patrons can taste the fruit flavors and something else that makes the brand unusual — mixed drinks. Other tasting rooms are in Au Gres, Harrisville and West Branch.

Tasting rooms allow people to try the various wines in flights to get a feel for the flavors. Or, they can get a little wild.

“We found that the wines were fruity enough that they were good in spritzers,” Smith said. She also sees the popularity of mixes as a response to trends in the beverage world — hard sodas and similar drinks are gaining in popularity.

Fans are encouraged to mix certain wines together — or different mixers — to create unique drinks. Popular mixes include Slow Juke Juice (blackberry wine and lemonade) or Fuzzy Cherry (cherry and peach wines).

“The mixing was definitely an evolution of the wine,” she said. “It gave us another opportunity to be a different kind of wine.

They find these recipes by experimenting with different mixers at the home base in Au Gres. Plus, the company will host a mixing party where customers can bring in things to try as a bit of a competition ­— the more unusual recipes come out of these contests.

Promoting these recipes is a bit of a boon to retailers as it gives stores something to sell along with wines. Modern Craft suggests specific sodas, such as certain flavors of Jones Sodas, in its recipes.

Wine purists may turn their collective noses up at the idea of mixing a wine with a soda. At tastings, Smith starts purists out with one of the fruit wines then works them up to trying out mixes. And it seems to work.

Modern Craft is not all fancy fruit flavors either. The wines start with grapes grown by various Michigan farms. For those who prefer the fruit on the side, some traditional varieties are available.

“In April, we came out with the Northbound White and the Northbound Red and those are both traditional wines,” Smith said.